Developer forum

I do not know how you generate the links to PDP in your template - and if you are using product catalog for viewmodels or the old version - or Swift.

A couple of suggestions

1. Set the primary page id on groups
   1. This will change the PDP page to use what has been specified here - if you use .GetProductLink extension method for Dynamicweb.Ecommerce.ProductCatalog.ProductListViewmodel (extensions in same namespace)
   2. This will also change the canonicals
2. In your product list, manually replace the pageid to the detail page you want to use
   1. Combine this with sending out 404 in the PDP template on the pages you do not want PDP to be used in.
3. Create a Standard.Page.Loaded notification subscriber that will check pageid, groupid and productid and based on the issue 301s to desired location

[Subscribe(Standard.Page.Loaded)]
    public class EcomPageLoadNotificationSubscriber : NotificationSubscriber

Hi Nicolai

I will just assist here to elaborate on the issue. The problem is actually not with the links in the frontend, as this works as intended. The problem is that the URLs are automatically generated and therefore indexed by search engines. We do have measures to handle the search engines, like with redirects, canonicals, 404 as you suggest, but we wanted to investigate the possibility for not generating these URLs at all.

We are using "Product catalog for Viewmodel" app and running on DW 9.12.0.

Example: In the content tree we have 2 different pages on these paths, and both of them includes the "Product catalog for Viewmodel" content app:

• /{PageName1}
• /{PageName1}/{PageName2}

When we do this, this setup will automatically generate 2 URLs at these location:

• /{PageName1}/{ProductHandle}
• /{PageName1}/{PageName2}/{ProductHandle}

The actual content on these URLs can obviously be different, because it depends on the content setup of {PageName1} and {PageName2}, but we want to avoid the generation of the second URL, so are there any settings that we can use to stop generating the second URL, or do we need to implement solutions that mitigate the issues like the forementioned solutions with redirects, canonical and such.

BR Chris

Hi DW

Any news on this? It is very important to the customer to fix this, so it would be nice to have an idea whether it is possible to avoid this without implementing the beforementioned workarounds.

BR Chris

Hi Chris

No - it is currently not supported.

It might be possible to add a feature to the url provider on the page that will use the navigation settings (also from page) to generate URLs. It will be better, but not perfect.

Wanna give it a try and a test spin?

BR Nicolai

Hi Nicolai

Yes it would be great if that could take us some of the way, but I'm unsure how it would work. The site is not set up to use URL providers or Ecom navigation today, because the frontend handles the links to PLP and PDP through code.

But if it is possible to add a setting to a provider that stops the URL propagation for product pages, then it would be great.

BR Chris

Then - how should Dynamicweb guess what is on that page?

And are you using the Ecommerce URL providers in settings -> web & http or the 'new' ones on the page?

That was poor phrasing. 

What I meant was that we do not use Navigation settings or URL providers on page level and frontend implements whatever links to the "right" product details page. This was just to clarify that we do not have problems with human navigation on site, just that the URLs are generated.

But this also answers your question here as we are using the settings from Web & Http for this solution

Okay thank you for your support here. We will look into migrating to "new" URL provider on page level.

Just out of curiosity, where are the settings for the URL handling in Web & HTTP handled (in database or GlobalSettings). I have some issues changing the settings from backoffice

Nevermind I found it. Thank you for your support

You are welcome - they are in globalsettings